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The History Of Zork

[Gamasutra is proud to be partnering with the IGDA's Preservation
SIG to present detailed official histories of each of the first ten
games voted into the Digital Game Canon.
The Canon "provides a starting-point for the difficult task of
preserving this history inspired by the role of that the U.S. National
Film Registry has played for film culture and history", and Matteo
Bittanti, Christopher Grant, Henry Lowood, Steve Meretzky, and Warren
Spector revealed the inaugural honorees at GDC 2007. This second piece takes a look back at one of the grandfathers of interactive fiction and story-based games, in Infocom's text-based classic Zork.]

Zork.
For some, the name conjures up little more than a dim notion of
the “primitive” era of home computing, back when graphics
technology was so lacking that desperate gamers were willing to buy
games even if they consisted entirely of text. For this group, the
entire genre of “adventure games,” or “interactive fiction,”
or whatever you wish to call it, was simply making a virtue of
necessity. Gamers didn’t have access to good graphics technology,
so they had to make do without it. Once the technology allowed for
more “compelling” graphical experiences, of course this quaint
text-only genre would go extinct. As for playing Zork today—you’re
kidding, right? The text adventure is dead, kaput, deceased, expired,
gone to meet the great developer in the sky. This genre is an
ex-genre.

For
others, though, the name Zork still makes their Elven swords
glow blue. To them, saying that Zork is obsolete makes no more
sense than saying J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ring trilogy is obsolete.
Why do people still read Tolkienor any other novelists when
there are so many movies and channels available on TV? If graphics
and animation are so essential, then why haven’t comics and pop-up
books long overtaken “plain text” novels on the New York Times
best seller list? It isn’t difficult to see that humans aren’t
exactly uniform or predictable in their preference for a given mode
of entertainment. One size does not fit all, nor should it.
Unfortunately, although movies and television never caused the novel
to go out of production, graphical video games do seem to have caused
the extinction of the text adventure. Or have they?

“The
majority of people that play computer games today do not even
entertain the notion that text adventure games are games at all. In
their minds ‘games=graphics’; If they see a jumble of text on
their screen they're much more likely to think their computer crashed
than consider the possibility they're playing a game.” – Howard
Sherman, President of Malinche
Entertainment

“Modern
gamers have seen and played a whole range of games since 1989, and of
course to them Zork is a pretty strange experience; it's
retro, it's hard to get into, it's not graphical. I'm pleased that
people still play the games, given all the time that has passed and
all the advances in software and hardware.” – Dave Lebling,
Infocom Implementer

However,
perhaps this is not a simple matter of cause and effect. Perhaps it’s
wrong to assume that the availability of good graphics technology
caused the decline of games like Zork. If “interactive
fiction” has migrated to the margins of the computer gaming
industry, it could be due simply to a lack of good marketing, not
evidence of some inherent limitation of the genre. It’s quite
possible that one day, when enough gamers are at last disillusioned
with the latest 128-bit smoke and mirror show, interactive fiction
titles will again enjoy the lucrative rewards won by Infocom during
the heyday of the Zork trilogy. After all, the treasures of
Zork are still there beneath the old white house, awaiting
their discovery by new generations of gamers. Zork is not
obsolete; merely under appreciated. Perhaps Zork is not the
past of gaming, but its future.

“Poetry
is a vibrant, essential part of American culture and many other
cultures, although there is really no market at all for it. (Some
companies publish poetry books, but practically no one makes a living
as a poet, even if they have won the Nobel Prize.) I think IF will be
a vibrant, essential part of digital media and literature even if no
one manages to sell it.” – Nick Montfort, author
of Twisty Little Passages

It’s
quite likely that no computer game in history has ever inspired as
much prose as Zork, even if we omit the billions of commands
inputted by legions of over-caffeinated hunt-and-peckers. Zork and
other text-based adventure games have long been the darling of
academics writing about games, such as Brenda Laurel and Janet
Murray.

No
doubt, many of those early visitors to The Great Underground Empire
felt they were experiencing the Future of the Novel. Developers and
critics dreamed of a day when interactive fiction games would sit
alongside their older brothers on the shelves of Borders and Barnes &
Noble, and standing proudly alongside Thomas Pynchon and Norman
Mailer in the reading queues of the literati. Sadly, it doesn’t
seem to have happened--at least, not yet. The question is, why? What,
if anything, is really beyond Zork?

“Zork
is all text—that means no graphics. None are needed. The authors
have not skimped on the vividly detailed descriptions of each
location; descriptions to which not even Atari graphics could do
complete justice.” –David P.
Stone in Computer Gaming World, Mar-Apr
1983

“I
think of them more as thematic crossword puzzles.” – Marc Blank,
former Infocom Implementer

Anyone
truly interested in Zork and interactive fiction will want to
read Nick Montfort’s excellent Twisty
Little Passages,
Graham Nelson’s A
Short History of Interactive Fiction,
and Tim Anderson’s own History
of Zork.
What I intend to do here is focus less on the developmental history
of the game and more on its impact, particularly on the ways it has
influenced modern adventure and role-playing games.

My
goal is to persuade you that the text adventure is still a viable
genre for modern gamers, even in an age when software and hardware
developers are making breakthrough
after breakthrough in graphics and animation. I want to talk about
the game developer that put its “graphics where the sun don’t
shine.”